What was Narcosis treatment?

Narcosis was a so-called mechanistic, somatic or physical treatment for serious mental illness and involved drugging psychiatric patients with barbiturates until they were unconscious and then maintaining them in this coma-like state for 20 hours each day and for up to three months at a time. These defenceless patients were then given intensive courses of electroconvulsive treatment, ECT, which they were in no condition to refuse. No one on Ward 5 had been sectioned under the relevant Mental Health Act, so all were voluntary patients who would have been able to refuse treatment if they hadn’t been drugged into insensibility. We know that some patients were given more than one course of Narcosis treatment and there is a record of one woman who remained in Narcosis for five months. This patient may be the ‘case’ recorded in Dr Sargant’s ‘An Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry’ who died of bowel complications after five months of Narcosis.

Patients who were on the main part of Ward 5 have spoken about the condition of the Narcosis patients that they saw comparing them to zombies and it’s clear that the prospect of being admitted to Narcosis was a frightening one. The Ward 5 Association maintains that no one would willingly have gone into the Narcosis Room and we assume that since no one can remember actually being admitted there, they were drugged on the main ward and then taken into Narcosis in order to stop them refusing point blank to enter the small, dark and fetid room that held six beds. The fact that patient’s relatives were never allowed to see the inside of the Narcosis Room or visit patients there speaks for itself.